Diary of a country woman

She was a labourer's daughter who left school at 13 to work in a post office. Flora Thompson's recollections of growing up in an Oxfordshire village capture a vanishing world and create an authentic picture of rural working-class life. Richard Mabey on the enduring appeal of Lark Rise to Candleford

It's one of those rare book titles that are as evocative as a scent from childhood. Lark Rise to Candleford: the whole pulse of rural life seems distilled into those few words, from the sky-bound bird at daybreak to the last light of a cottage evening. The book itself doesn't disappoint. Flora Thompson's account of life in rural Oxfordshire in the last decades of the 19th century portrays an entire culture still governed by the rising and setting of the sun. But the old cyclical rhythms are beginning to break up. The village teenagers leave to work in the big houses, as before, but come home with unsettling new ideas. The telegraph is dissolving the barriers of time and space between settlements. There is still a Harvest Home and a village Feast Day, but stalls stocked with factory-made sweets are arriving ... Life goes on as well as round.

Thompson's saga is a trilogy, originally published as three separate, but linked, narratives. Lark Rise (1939) is a part-lyrical, part-documentary portrait of the tiny hamlet, Juniper Hill, where she was born. Over to Candleford (1941) is a more close-focused study of her own family and her relatives in the nearby market town (based chiefly on Buckingham). Candleford Green (1943) is partly modelled on the village (Fringford) where she had her first job, as an assistant in the post office. But brought together under that felicitously condensed title in 1945, they become something more: an account of a social journey, a rite of passage between the ancient, oral, self-sufficient culture of the traditional countryside and the new world of the commuter village, the rural suburb.

One of Thompson's skills as a writer is to make even the most minutely detailed anecdote work as an allegory, and there is a beautifully crafted episode in Over to Candleford where the young Flora (or Laura, as she is dubbed) makes this journey between hamlet and upwardly mobile market town, quite literally, on foot. It is high summer, and the expedition that she and her brother Edwin (Edmund in the book) make is like an odyssey out of arcadia into an undiscovered country. Every sight, sound and smell has a burning intensity, as if being experienced for the first time. And along their eight-mile route, emblems of the old world and the new click together like knitting needles. The children leave at seven in the morning, the 11-year-old Laura in a green smock, her younger brother in an "ex-Sunday" white sailor suit, and both sporting fashionable "Zulu hats" plaited out of rushes. The mist is still rising from the stooks, but the fields are already full of gleaners, gathering stray wheat-ears in a practice that would be extinct in two decades. The children are intoxicated by the sense of freedom on this first unaccompanied adventure and relish every moment: the late summer flowers, the gathering swallows (already easy with telegraph wires), the gaudy sticks of seaside rock from a village shop, the unfamiliar wagons and farmers met on the road. Going to Candleford, eh? "Keep puttin' one foot in front o' t'other an' you'll be there before dark." When they do reach the outskirts of the town, "they saw what must have looked like a girls' school out for a walk advancing between the hedgerows towards them." It was a relief party, consisting of their cousins and their schoolfriends, bearing tea. These sophisticated girls initiate Laura into boy-talk, but she is more taken with the material wonders of the town, the wax dummies in the dressmakers' shops, the fishmonger's "where a whole salmon reposed on a bed of green reeds with ice sprinkled over (ice in August! They would never believe it at home)".

Part of the book's appeal is that we can't quite believe it either. We've been through that rite of passage, and many more, and in our world-weariness over a century later find it both enchanting and incredible that the world could seem so new-minted, and be so available to a child. Lark Rise is never really nostalgic, but it is about yearning.

Thompson's whole life was a kind of social migration. She was born the daughter of a builder's labourer in a tiny, poverty-racked hamlet, rose out of her class by working in the postal service (what a gift for a future author, to be a modern Mercury) and ended up as a professional writer in Dartmouth.

Her sense of dislocation, of drifting away from her roots to become an onlooker, helped give her the perspective to create what is perhaps the most intimate and persuasive account of the old rural order just before its transformation by modernism. Lark Rise is remarkable because of this point of view. Other writers have given us sympathetic descriptions of traditional rural life - George Bourne in Change in the Village (1912), for example, Mary Russell Mitford's Our Village (1824-32) and, in fiction, Elizabeth Gaskell (the bookish Laura dotes on Cranford). But these were all witnesses from a background of relative gentility, not possessed of "the indigenous eye". Thompson was exceptional in being a child of the rural working class. As Margaret Lane has written, "She was able to write the annals of the poor because she was one of them." Her distancing from the culture she describes - and it is an important one - is one of time, not origins. Lark Rise was written half a century after the events it records. The author's recollections of her childhood, and of a world that had partly vanished, are poignant but never sentimental, as they might have been 20 years earlier. Her exquisite detailing of manners and language is brushed with just a hint of detachment and reflection. Both nuances lift the book out of the realm of simple social documentary into creative literature. At times Thompson seems to be working like a novelist, merging places, hybridising characters, juggling anecdote and memoir and social history.

Her most accomplished literary device was the introduction into the text of "Laura", her young self, a character who is both a participant in the story and an observer of it (one chapter is entitled "Laura Looks On"). Although the whole text is autobiographical, Thompson never speaks in the first person. Laura is there as an implicit witness: what you read, she has experienced. But this use of the third person isn't taken to contrived lengths. Thompson has too much to say on her own behalf to let Laura narrate the book, and most of the storylines are formally uncomplicated: a grown-up is reflecting on her past, and interpreting it through the lens of everything she has read and seen in the years since. But then, just when the narrative seems to be drifting towards routine social history, up pops Laura, looks at the situation differently from her grown-up self, has a fit of the giggles and owns up to hanging on to a bottle of sea water as a lucky charm. "Laura" grounds the text in its own time, liberates it from an excess of adult emotion and reasonableness. She is a kind of filter or arbitrator, mediating between Thompson's imagination and the world she left behind.

This was sophisticated stuff for a labourer's daughter who left school at the age of 13. Thompson became a writer by a gradual process of detachment from her roots and insinuation into a literary culture. What happened between her life in Juniper Hill and her reconstruction of it 50 years later is important in understanding the kind of record Lark Rise is. Her early years are the subject of the book and don't need much repeating here. She was born in December 1876, the eldest child of Albert Timms, who had come to Juniper Hill from Oxford. He was a skilled mason, but, Thompson recounts, a frustrated one, who had dreamed of being a sculptor when he was a young man. His job description on the baptism notices of his 10 children (four died in infancy) follows an erratic course, which may reflect his fondness for drink, as well as the radical politics that made him unpopular in the village. He is a simple labourer at Thompson's baptism in 1877, a mason in 1894, and in 1898 is down to a bricklayer again.

If her father's disaffection helped form her social attitudes, her mother Emma fostered her love of storytelling. She was a local girl who'd left school at 12, and was a nursemaid at a nearby rectory when she married. Thompson talks fondly of her mother's love of traditional songs and her gift for telling stories. She herself was also making up stories from the beginning, fixing in words (and in her memory) her acute and insatiably curious observations of everything from petticoat styles to pig killing. She regarded herself as a failure at the National School in nearby Cottisford (Fordlow in the text), but was an accomplished and obsessive reader. Books, she stresses, were always available to those who wanted them. They could be borrowed from schoolteachers and the Mechanics' Institutes libraries, even from the gentry, and Thompson gobbled them up, classic fiction and penny romance alike. When she ran out of stories, she read dictionaries. In Candleford, she had a reading pact with her uncle Tom. "Every afternoon when her cousins could be persuaded to go out or do what they wanted to do without her, she would tap at the door of her uncle's workshop and hear the familiar challenge: 'Who goes there?' and reply: 'Bookworms, Limited'."

Thompson may have inclined to solitariness, but she was bright and creative in her own way, and when it was time for her to join the diaspora of village girls, she went not into service, but to the post office in Fringford, a village three miles to the south-east. The postmistress, Dorcas Lane (who was also the owner of the adjoining smithy), was an unconventional career woman, modern in her moral views, but with old-fashioned good taste and a high sense of decorum. She broadened young Thompson's outlook, giving her the opportunity to tour the parish on postal deliveries and introducing her to new ideas and books, including Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Thompson smuggled a copy of Byron's Don Juan off her bookshelves and read it under the bedclothes. She admired Lane's style, her sharpness, her quiet independence, her dapper clothes. And it was the metaphor-hungry Thompson, I think, rather than Laura, who loved the way the telegraph machine, covered up with a tea cosy, sat next to Lane's exquisite antique furniture.

When Thompson left Fringford at some time in her late teens, she had a new self-confidence, but also a kind of restlessness. She relished her periods of solitude, her long tramps about the countryside on letter delivery, her maturing love and understanding of the natural world. Perhaps she already had dreams of being a Byron or a Gaskell. But Lark Rise ends with her departure from Fringford, and the next time we hear from Flora - and about Laura - it is 1897 and she is working in a post office in Grayshott, near Haslemere in Surrey. She wrote a new book about this period, just after she had finished Candleford Green, in about 1945. It had a title, Heatherley, but Thompson was dissatisfied with the text and didn't attempt to have it published. It appeared posthumously in 1979 and fills in some of the details of Thompson's life in her early 20s. Otherwise it isn't a distinguished book. Heatherley/Grayshott is a "new" village, with no indigenous culture and a population consisting largely of former town-dwellers. Laura too was a transient, an incomer, and had lost the childhood charm that Thompson had relied on to mellow her stories in Lark Rise

Heatherley is chiefly interesting for the clues it gives to Thompson's growing interest in writing - and in other writers. The "Surrey Highlands" around Grayshott were swarming with them. Conan Doyle was forever "bursting like a breeze into the post office and filling it with his fine presence". So were Bernard Shaw (with his "forked red beard and quick, searching eyes"), the novelist Grant Allen and the young poet Richard Le Gallienne. Laura admits to being star-struck by these authors, but Thompson was sceptical of their influence on her. "I used to listen to the conversation of these," she wrote in a later essay, "meeting and greeting each other at my counter, myself as unregarded as a piece of furniture, but noting all. Perhaps these 'great examples' encouraged my desire to express myself in writing, but I cannot remember the time when I did not wish and mean to write. My brother and I used to make up verses and write stories and diaries from our earliest years, and I had never left off writing essays for the pleasure of writing. No one saw them; there was no one likely to be interested."

In Heatherley, alas, Laura is tight-lipped about her emotional life, as if Thompson remembers her 20-year-old self as a shy and embarrassed woman, and doesn't want to second-guess her. But there's a revealing moment that shows just how far her thought processes were driven by an interior storytelling, and how her views about human relationships were developing (also, incidentally, how expert she was becoming in natural history). She is walking with two friends over the heathland nearby, when they find a patch of heather "netted and dragged down" by the tendrils of a parasite. "Laura told them it was dodder, and said that, if she were a novelist, she would write a book with that title. It would be the story of a man or woman - she thought a woman - of fine, sensitive nature, bound by some tie - probably marriage - to one of a nature which was strong, coarse and encroaching, and would tell how, in time, the heather person shrank and withered, while the dodder one fattened and prospered." Her friends spoke of the dodder husband as the villain of the piece, but Laura rushed to the defence of her newly created character: "The dodder cannot help being dodder, it was made that way, and must act according to its nature."

It seems a premonitory insight, in many ways. After four years of post office salons and evenings with her fin-de-siècle (as they called themselves) girlfriends, her free-range life came to a close. She met a young post office clerk from Aldershot called John Thompson, and when he was transferred to the main office in Bournemouth, they married. They had a son and daughter, Basil and Winifred, but the marriage was no happy joining of kindred souls. John was provincial and aggressively class-conscious; he derided her taste for books and her writing ambitions. So she wrote in secret, and with two children to feed was spurred into trying to make her scribblings pay. She won a competition in a women's magazine for an essay on Jane Austen. She began contributing stories to the socialist Daily Citizen, the only time she nailed her innate radicalism to a particular political mast. In 1912, she acquired a mentor, the Scottish poet Ronald Campbell Macfie. After the sinking of the Titanic that year, Macfie wrote an ode on the disaster in the Literary Review, which then invited readers to contribute critiques of the ode in a competition. Thompson's admiring notice won the prize. Macfie wrote her a grateful letter, and they remained close friends until his death in 1931. His unstinting support was one of the most important factors in encouraging her towards a more personal mode of writing.

She was to get her opportunity soon. In 1916, her husband was promoted to his first sub-postmastership, and the family moved to Liphook, in east Hampshire, only three miles from their previous post in Grayshott. It was a bad year for Thompson. Her beloved brother Edwin was killed in action, breaking her last emotional link with her childhood in Juniper Hill. She was exhausted by wartime duties, and for a while she couldn't write at all. But when the war ended, her energies revived. Her earnings meant that she could just afford to send her children to day schools, and suddenly she had some freedom again, to wander the hills around Liphook and rekindle her passion for nature relished in solitude. Within a short while she'd begun writing the first prototypes for the scenes in Lark Rise. She had persuaded the editors of the Catholic Fireside (she was not a catholic herself, but the magazine had published some of her stories) to run a series called "Out of Doors in ... [January, February and so on]". These columns are ostensibly a kind of rural diary, with notes on natural history, folklore, weather and a few local characters. The real stuff of the countryside. But the setting is far from real. Out of a desire to give her imagination more play, or perhaps a lingering feeling of inadequacy, Thompson invents a fictitious self, more intellectual, more romantically situated. In 1920, she and her family were crammed into a small house next to the post office in the centre of Liphook. But her alter ego is living alone in an ancient cottage deep in the New Forest, accompanied by a dog called Boojie. She's visited by actresses and poets. In October, "I am already making my winter plans. I have taken down the Dante, and placed it with the Italian dictionary upon the little table by the hearth."

After two years, the column (popular with the magazine's readers) was retitled "The Peverel Papers" and the scene has shifted to the great chalk hills west of Liphook. There is no such local place as Peverel (though there were Peverells back in Juniper Hill), and "the mere snail-shell of a place ... tucked away amongst the pine and holly" was also a fiction. But the details of the local countryside are evocative and precise. This is charged territory. The poet Edward Thomas - killed in the war in the same year as Thompson's brother - had lived at Steep, just a few miles to the south-west. Selborne, mother lode of the pioneering nature writer Gilbert White, was a five-mile walk away. Peverel was a habitat as different as you could imagine from the bland Midlands fieldscape of her birthplace, a labyrinth of hanging beechwoods, soaring downland, acid bogs. Yet it stimulated her into her first writings about her childhood. Lark Rise characters such as Sally and Queenie make their first appearance. Conversations that Thompson's new incarnation - "The Hermit of Peverel" - had with Gypsies and shepherds were reworked when she came to recount similar characters in Lark Rise, and it is anyone's guess which is the true original.

Much of the material in "The Peverel Papers" is devoted to natural history, and her debt to White - whose writings she refers to often - is obvious. Her notes are acute, empathetic, exquisitely written. She writes of the protective architecture of the skylark's nest, of the ancient names of wild flowers, of the ravishing lustre of a kingfisher's wing - "a living light rather than a colour". (The bird reappears as a metaphor in Lark Rise, where "The gentry flitted across the scene like kingfishers crossing a flock of hedgerow sparrows.") Somewhere amid her copious readings in fiction and poetry she had found time for an exacting trawl through scientific biology, so that she was conversant with, for example, the intricate anatomy of plants and the mechanisms of succession in woodland. But her ecologically precise account of the part played by mosses in the build-up of vegetation can't be read neutrally by anyone who is aware of Thompson's appetite for seeing parallels between human and natural life: "each small tuft drawing its sustenance from the air, dying and leaving behind it the residue of its decay, until soil enough had collected for higher vegetable life to flourish in ... Servi, or labourers, the great botanist Linnaeus called the mosses ..."

The Catholic Fireside columns covered six years and a quarter of a million words, and during their course Thompson started a reading and writing circle, called "The Peverel Society". Then, in 1928, John Thompson was transferred to Dartmouth. She stayed behind to sell the house, and spent a year alone with the children and the countryside she loved, without postal work to bother about or a husband to sneer at her. Once she had moved to Dartmouth, her writing stagnated, and it was 1937 before The Lady published an extended essay on "Old Queenie", which would eventually form part of a chapter in Lark Rise. A few months later, the chapter now titled "May Day" was accepted by the Fortnightly Review.

These essays were enthusiastically received, and Thompson was encouraged to send them and several similar pieces to Oxford University Press. The publisher, Sir Henry Milford, recognised their quality and originality, and urged her to expand them into a book. This was the kind of recognition she had yearned for all her life, and she completed the manuscript of Lark Rise, the first part of the trilogy, in 11 months. It was published on the eve of war in 1939.

Lark Rise to Candleford is remarkable for its celebratory realism. It neither romanticises poverty nor underplays it. Thompson gazes back at the goings-on in her home country with the same loving attention that White paid to his house crickets and swallows, noticing everything but judging nothing. No detail is insignificant. She records women's underwear, men's drinking habits, children's games; illness, casual beauty, timeless harvest homes, and the arrival of "furniture on instalment". She recalls with equal dispassion - and wit - the 12-year-old Laura's unperturbed witnessing of a cow and bull in flagrante ("the sight did not warp her nature", the post-Freudian Thompson adds) and the hamlet's serving up of "rough music" outside an adulterer's cottage. Human difference and frailty - the lone bachelors, the idiots, Queenie (who talks to her bees) - are accepted and nurtured. Only disloyalty and unkindness receive the scourge of the hamlet's collective conscience.

Thompson's narrative teems with stories of human warmth and ingenuity, but is too skilfully assembled, too sympathetically wry, to be simply archival. The men use soot as toothpaste; Laura borrows her dad's toothbrush to spread dye on her hair. The houses are decorated with pictures cut out of the newspapers ("The Tay Bridge Disaster", "Our Political Leaders") - and the privy walls are chalked with health and sanitary maxims. She's especially acute in her observations of clothing, a weather vane not just of the villagers' canniness in making do and sharing, but of their aspirations, and sense of the world beyond Lark Rise. When bustles arrived (new fashions, she reckoned, came to the hamlet a year after they hit Candleford), she remembers style-mad farm women making them from old cushions and wearing them to feed the pigs. The contents of Lark Rise are a kind of superior gossip, the activity which, in John Berger's words, gives a village the means to make "a living portrait of itself".

Yet the more you read this exhaustive record, the less it seems to be happenstance, or casual. This lexicon of recycled clothes and eked-out puddings and pub songs going back to the Middle Ages is the vocabulary through which the people of Lark Rise transact their lives. Thompson uses the metaphor of living "close to the bone". The villagers "were getting very near the bone from which their country ancestors had fed. [They] would have to depend wholly upon whatever was carved for them from the communal joint." There are two telling anecdotes in Lark Rise which suggest that, for Thompson, self-help and a kind of organic mutuality were more important than the conventional radical ideal of social equality. After every new birth in the village, "The Box" made an appearance. This was an oak clothes box (wheeled around in one of the hamlet's two prams), which contained half a dozen of all the clothes a baby would need, which had been made and lent by the clergyman's daughter. At the end of a month or two, the mother would repair and launder the clothes and the box was ready for the next arrival. Then, one summer, the cheapjack pays a first visit to Lark Rise, and offers the villagers an eggshell china tea service, hand-painted with roses. None of them can afford it, till a onetime soldier, just back from India, buys it for 10 bob. Thompson tells how the villagers saw this as a kind of communal purchase that rehabilitated their reputation, and how they proudly helped the soldier carry his cups and saucers home.

White called such minute observations "nice" - meaning, strictly, discriminating, but also suggesting respect. It's hard not to read Thompson's account as a tribute, an implicit defence of the way of life she is taking such trouble to immortalise. Her attention creates a kind of halo above Lark Rise, an intimation that self-help and neighbourliness and sheer guts are paths not just to survival, but to real happiness. The authenticity of her story isn't in doubt, but is there any way in which her subtle half-fictions and translocations and alchemy with characters - her imaginative skills, in fact - make life in Lark Rise seem more attractive than it truly was?

Thompson, to be fair, never makes claims in Lark Rise itself about the interior quality of the lives she is describing. Just once, in a letter to the rural historian HJ Massingham in 1943, she writes that "I fear that much of the salt of the earth will be lost in the process of transforming the old, sturdy, independent farm labourer into the proletariat. The only hope is that the countryman's roots are so strong and so well down in the soil that, after this terrible time is over, the country virtues will spring anew." But writing to Massingham on another occasion she had confessed that "Words as to the inner emotions do not come readily to me, for I have led an isolated life mentally and spiritually."

Lark Rise to Candleford was never intended to be a guide either to Thompson's adult feelings or to those of its characters. Her focus is elsewhere, and it's worth considering that the book that is the true successor to Lark Rise, though it is immeasurably more personal, is Laurie Lee's luminous account of his childhood, Cider with Rosie (1959) - also written several decades after the events it recounts. Both books celebrate the child's-eye view, with its clarity and exaltation in the physical wonder of the world. Their outlook may be naive, but they are an assault on cynicism and on any surrender to mundanity and helplessness, and in that sense are deeply, heroically political.

Throughout her life, Thompson reiterated her belief that technical progress, mediated by respect for the best of the past, would improve the lives of rural people. "Other days, other ways!" she remarks in "The Peverel Papers". "For myself I would desire a combination of old romance and modern machinery" (echoing the sentiment of an earlier rural writer, Richard Jefferies, who wanted "the light railway to call at the farm gate"). Alas, the modern machinery has come at the expense of the old romance. Today, what in modern tourist jargon would be called "Lark Rise Country" has been stripped of all its neighbourly institutions. School, shop and post office have vanished. The Lark Rise pub has been converted to a private house, in whose garden grows the last juniper bush surviving from the legion that gave Juniper Hill its name. And the arable prairies that replaced them stretch all the way to Candleford. Thompson's exact and childlike vision of the ecstasy of nature, and of a life lived close to it, has never been more relevant.

• Lark Rise to Candleford returns to BBC1 for a second series, starting with a feature-length Christmas special on December 21 at 7.45pm. It is is reissued this month by Penguin Classics (£11.99). To order a copy for £10.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to theguardian.com/bookshop